Tomi Mercy Ademokun  is an expert in public health, international development, and campaigns and advocacy, with over 10 years of experience, including six years working internationally.
 Currently, Tomi is the Associate Country Director/GROW Campaign Manager for OXFAM GB in Nigeria. The GROW campaign is dedicated to overcoming poverty and injustice and works with partners in Nigeria in order to achieve impact and improvement in the lives of people, especially women family farmers, on the issues relating to agriculture, food security, trade and climate change.
In this interview with JIMOH BABATUNDE in Lagos during the Oxfam Grow Campaign, she talks about the role of small holder farmers in  agriculture and why they need access to information as well as the need to advocate for the realisation of the 10% budgetary allocation to agriculture in Nigeria.
Here is an excerpt:

On Oxfam and agriculture
We work with small scale  farmers in Nigeria and our mission in Nigeria and across the world is to eliminate poverty and injustice and to ensure we have a good food system where everybody has enough food to eat.

On smallholder farmers feeding the nation
The smallholder farmers have the capacity to feed the nation, because if you look at all the sectors in Nigeria, agriculture is still the second leading  sector after oil and gas in GDP. However, there is a lot of gap in the system.
Over 80 per cent of Nigeria’s food is produced by small-scale farmers, of whom 60-79 per cent are women. These farmers work on small plots of land  and rely on rainfall for irrigation. Despite several policies being designed to improve the chances of small farmers, there is a fundamental gap between policy intentions and their implementation. This gap affects many areas of agricultural life including access to credit, markets and land security.

We really need to campaign to government to keep their promise to transform the sector. Right now, we have  the Agriculture Transformation Agenda (ATA) by the ministry which is really good.
We also have the Maputo pledge, where the government promised  to dedicate 10 per cent of the national budget to agriculture, but the current budget to agriculture is about two per cent, so we need to ensure that 2014 budget  is increased  not just in quantity but the quality of those investments.

We also need to ensure that those investments get down to the state and local government levels, where the small-scale farmers need them.

If you look at our farmers today, a lot of them are ageing  so we need a new generation of farmers and that is why we need to transform agriculture management and look at it as a thriving business where the youth can come in.
There are lots of equipment and technology for the youth in the business and this is one of the reasons we are getting celebrities as ambassadors  to try to change the myth and stereotype of old fashioned ways of doing things.

On whether the youth will take up farming as it is not yet practised as business
The system is broken, if you want to practise it as a business, how will you get access to loans to start the business as a lot of the banking institutions do not give loans to farmers because they believe  it is high risk business, so we need to make sure that we work with the government and partner with the Central Bank of Nigeria.
The CBN actually has an agric loan scheme, however, there is a lot of gaps as lots of the small holder farmers still don’t have access to it, it is the medium and large scale farmers that are accessing those loans and other schemes.
What do we mean by the gap between the intention and implementation? A good example is the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), which was introduced in 2012 in order to improve small farmers’ access to credit. The concept sounded good on paper, but in practice, small holder farmers could not meet the stringent loan conditions whose prevailing interest rate of 20 per cent made them no more accessible than commercial loans.
We need to advocate  to the government to ensure that they make those schemes available to young entrepreneurs that want to come into agriculture.

On whether the smallholder farmers have information on how to access loan
A lot of that is lack of information as most of our farmers are not literate, so it is hard for them to really  have access to information that they need, information on how to link up across the value chain, how to  link up to the market and how to transport their produce to the market.
So, access to information is key, so that is where we come in  at Oxfam and other local civil society organisations as well as the media so as to make our smallholder farmers and female food heroes  champions of change. Where they can say I am a farmer, I need to improve my livelihood, I need to make my business thrive and improve it.

On the success story of getting women into farming
Women are already in farming for years as 70 per cent of our smallholder farmers are women, but a lot of them don’t have access to resources. A lot of women farmers  don’t own the land,  they farm on family owned land or rented land from government, but they don’t have land ownership, they don’t understand how to market, if they sell they don’t know to do so at marketable rate.
So, we are teaching them those skills where they can learn, so access to information is key  to the women farmers especially those that don’t have access to information. We are breaking the information down to the level they will understand.
Most of the lobby we do, we partner with radio stations, we make sure our  our materials are broken down into pidgin and lot of the local languages they can understand.

On aggregating the smallholder farmers into a body
We are actually working with Association of Small scale Agric Producers in Nigeria. It is a coalition. They have a coalition called The Voices of Food Security  Coalition that has about 17 other farmer group. They have registered over 800 farmers across 17 states in Nigeria.
They are trying to scale up as they are working with the ministries of agriculture to ensure that all farmers are registered in the ministries’ data base. So we work with coalitions of  different partners as we believe the power of the people  is the power of people uniting by coming together to make the change.

On getting Nigeria to honour the Maputo declaration
It comes to partnership. We need to spread the word, we need to advocate and prove that increased investment in agriculture  can actually make the economy of Nigeria  better and eliminate poverty. It can actually help the  country to be food secured as a hungry man is an angry man.

So when you don’t have access to food, there is lot of violence, a lot of things happen, so we can make sure that we lobby and partner with various media outlets  to ensure that in the 2014 budget formation, we ensure to remind them of the promise and say look, 10 years ago  you made a pledge in Maputo, we need to honour the pledge.

On post-harvest loss
We are working with local institutions and with the government to address that, and also not just on post- harvest loss but storage and when you talk of climate change like the flooding that happened last year, there was no storage system where there was food, instead the resolution of the government was to import food.